The Media Research Center still wasn’t done trying to exploit the stabbing death of white woman Irina Zarutska by a scary black man — or complaining that this exploitation was called out for what it is. Clay Waters grumbled in a Sept. 11 post:
Weeks after it happened and days after other networks belatedly picked up the story, PBS News Hour on Tuesday arrived on the scene of the stabbing murder of Ukrainian refugee Irina Zarutska, by an apparently mentally ill man who had previously been arrested 14 times, aboard a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina.
(Notice how even the supposedly demented individuals aren’t crazy enough to attack men larger than they are, but choose to target vulnerable women instead.)
Host Geoff Bennett painted the tragedy as a cynical Republican talking point, one “that claimed the life of a young Ukrainian refugee and has become a rallying cry for Republicans,” and which the GOP is using to “support President Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard in more cities.”
Reporter William Brangham’s report was somewhat better than that, but still included the inevitable “seized on by Republicans” moment.
Waters didn’t dispute that Republicans did, in fact, seize on the incident for partisan reasons.
Intern Isaac White showed off how well he has been indoctrinated in pushing right-wing narratives in his own post that day:
The left-wing media continued to Trumpwash the horrific murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on Tuesday’s edition of The 11th Hour. MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle hosted a panel, including a segment on state-federal law enforcement cooperation and the recent stabbing in Charlotte with former Senator Doug Jones (D-AL), and the two of them griped about the kind of attention the murder was receiving, including from President Trump.
[…]Ruhle switched the subject to the recent murder of Ukrainian refugee Zarutska, huffing about the kind of attention it was receiving and giving Jones another opportunity to butcher common sense. Jones’s faux impartiality on the evil of murder was betrayed by injecting Trump into the issue[.] […]
Jones decided to save the worst for last, speculating that the murder would not have been picked up by the media had the victim been black: “But now this has become such a political issue, that I—and there’s so many others. You know, I wonder, I wonder, Stephanie, would this have been such an issue if this hadn’t have been a pretty blonde, Ukrainian and was a poor black woman coming up in the subway just trying to get home from a domestic help. Would that have been publicized? I doubt it. I doubt it seriously.”
Ironically, even in the face of Jones’s twisted theory that nation’s attention on the Charlotte murder was racially-charged, Ruhle failed to push back.
Despite calling the racial animus lurking underneath the right’s seizing on this crime “twisted,” White didn’t prove otherwise.
Nicholas Fondacaro did his own grousing in his Sept. 12 hate-watch of “The View”:
It took ABC’s The View till Wednesday, September 10 to finally address what many other liberal media shows had: the stabbing murder of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light rail. The liberal ladies huffed about the attention the case was getting and how it highlighted how dangerous their Democratic crime policies were. Moderator Whoopi Goldberg even shouted a demand to “stop trying to place blood on people’s hands,” while they also blamed President Trump.
“You know, look, a young woman is dead! Let’s — let’s take that into mind — into consideration. And, yes, a man who should have been behind bars was loose and out,” Goldberg shrieked following a soundbite of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt calling out how the killer benefitted from the Democratic Party’s permissiveness with crime.
Goldberg ignored those policies as she whined about how the killer’s mother begged for him to be institutionalized, but no one acted: “Listen, he was a schizophrenic man. His mother begged them to take him and put him away. So stop politicizing this! This is not political! This has to do with how we take care of our sick Americans when they are in need!”
[…]Faux conservative Alyssa Farah Griffin was too spineless to call out the Democratic Party policies of her fellow cast members. “I also don’t think most Americans hear a tragedy and see that video footage and think, ‘Oh, is this the Democrats or Republicans fault?’ They think what went wrong and what could the solution be?” she whined.
Farah Griffin noted that “bail reform” was a problem, even admitting, “Somebody should not be a 14-time offender and be back on the streets,” but she failed to accurately label the policy as Democratic.
White returned to praise ABC for playing into his preferred right-wing narrative:
On Friday morning, ABC’s Good Morning America featured an exclusive interview with the Uncle (left unnamed) of murdered Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, conducted by Stephanie Ramos. The focus remained mostly on Zarutska’s innocence and abruptly-shortened future.
Keeping the focus on Zarutska, Ramos briefly touching on the suspect’s criminal record. Zarutska’s passing was completely unexpected, especially when considering that her family said “she had never felt unsafe on the train and didn’t deserve to lose her life”:
[…]The insight Zarutska’s hopeful aspirations was refreshing and apolitical, which was perhaps why the interview was relegated to GMA. But questions still need to be answered, the most important being: Why wasn’t Brown, a consistent threat to public order and safety, not locked up for good prior to this tragedy?
White didn’t admit that he and his fellow right-wingers have seized on Zarutska’s death for partisan reasons in the hope of generating exactly this kind of coverage.